Contents

Description

The sky plugin is included with VDR and implements a new device, which is based on the MPEG2 encoder card described at linuxtv.org/mpeg2/kfir.xml. It allows you to connect the analog a/v output of your Sky Digibox to VDR, so that you can enjoy the full recording flexibility of VDR with your Sky subscription.

Note that this is NOT something that does anything illegal, like decrypting the Sky programme without a subscription. You will need a Sky Digibox and a valid subscription in order to use this plugin.

Hardware requirements

Software requirements

Installation

The 'kfir' module must be loaded with the option 'streamtype=4' to make it
produce a Transport Stream.

modprobe kfir streamtype=4

The Digibox is remotely controlled through VDR via LIRC (see lirc.org).
The file lircd.conf.sky contains the remote control codes necessary to
control the Digibox.

In order to access the Sky channels VDR needs to know the channel number
under which each channel is stored in the Sky Digibox. These numbers are
stored in the file channels.conf.sky, together with the channel IDs as
derived from the actual channel data and the names under which the EPG
data for each channel can be found (see below). Copy this file to your
plugins config directory, in a subdirectory named sky, as in

The Sky EPG is available on the Internet at http://www.bleb.org.
The Perl script getskyepg.pl extracts the EPG data from these pages
and sends it to VDR via an SVDRP connection. The channel names as
used on the bleb.org pages are defined in the channels.conf.sky file.
You can keep your EPG data up-to-date by entering a call to getskyepg.pl
into your /etc/crontab. Call getskyepg.pl -h for a list of options.